Tag: PC

Intel has introduced new mobile and desktop CPUs. The lineup now has processors for all PCs from ultrabooks to work stations.

The new Skylake architecture is made on Intel’s 14nm process and with it, the chips are more power-efficient. The lineup starts from the low-power Y-series. They are for ultrabooks, have two cores and support hyper threading. The Y-series has m3, m5, m7 and Pentium processors with 3.5 to 7 watt TDP.

U-lineup is for laptops and it has i3, i5, i7 and Pentium CPUs with TDP of 7.5 to 28 watts. All U-processors have two cores and support hyper threading. H-series is for more powerful laptops with i3 models having two cores and hyper threading, i5 CPUs are quad core without hyper threading and i7 processors have four cores and hyper threading. H-series also has quad core hyper threading Xeon processors for work station laptops.

Intel also updated their desktop Skylake lineup. With the unlocked i7-6700K and i5-6600K there’s now a wide variety of locked CPUs with a letter T at the end. Hyper threading is available on i3 and i7 CPUs. Core i5 and i7 processors have four cores and i3 and Pentium have two cores.

NVIDIA has released its new budget class desktop graphics card. The GTX 950 costs around $160 and will be available for customers right away.

The budget-minded GTX 950 packs 768 CUDA cores clocked at 1024MHz with boost clock of 1188MHz. It also has 2GB of 1650 MHz GDDR5 memory with 128-bit bandwidth. The card supports 2-way SLI and maximum of four displays.

The GTX 950 has a Dual Link DVI-I, HDMI 2.0 and 3 DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. It also supports DirectX 12, G-Sync and NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0. The card’s maximum power consumption is 90 watts and it uses one 6-pin PCIe power connector.

The GTX 950 replaces GTX 750 and 750 Ti graphics cards at the lower end of NVIDIA lineup. The reference card is available for purchase right away and at least EVGA, MSI and ZOTAC have their own design cards coming up.

Intel has released its new CPUs. There’s only two desktop CPUs at the launch and more will follow later in the year.

The higher-end Core i7-6700K retails at $350 and packs the usual 4 cores and 8 threads. Base clock is set to 4.0GHz and out of the box the Turbo boost boosts the clock speed up to 4.2GHz. The i7-6700K has 8MB of L3 cache.

Core i5-6600K is more affordable with $243 price tag but it lacks the hyper threading and has only 6MB of L3 cache. The i5-6600K runs at 3.5GHz and Turbos up to 3.9GHz.

Both new CPUs are made with Intel’s new 14nm process called Skylake. Both share the same TDP at 91 watts and the same integrated GPU. The HD 530 has 24 EU units running at 1150MHz. The new CPUs support both DDR4 and DDR3 memories.

With the new CPUs a new socket was launched. The LGA 1151 supports maximum of 4 DIMM slots and up to 16 PCIe lanes. We have no idea why Intel decided to limit PCIe support to 16 instead of 20 because it limits NVidia SLI to 3-way configurations. 4-way AMD Crossfire is still possible.

As the first benchmark are flooding to the internet, it looks like the new i7-6700K is only around 10% faster than the i7-4790K. In game benchmarks the gain is even smaller.

At the moment it looks like the Skylake is not going to be a great success as Haswell owners are not benefiting anything by upgrading. In the future there will be more Skylake products so we can’t doom them all yet. Still after Skylake, there will be Kaby Lake which is yet another tock and we are not expecting too much from it either. So we don’t believe the rest of Skylake lineup to be any more attractive than these just released desktop CPUs.